wearing nothing but a bikini. “Oh, you’re here already,” she said. “We thought we’d be done cooking by the time you got here.”
“Well, this is such a treat,” Weezy said. “Personal chefs on our first night here.” Cleo smiled and looked down at the ground. Then Weezy hugged Cleo, which must have been awkward since the girl was practically naked. Claire noticed that her father stayed on the far side of the kitchen and just waved. She didn’t blame him.
“We made chicken and salad,” Cleo said. “We thought you’d be hungry when you got here.”
“That we are,” Will said. He looked around the kitchen, still averting his eyes from Cleo. “You didn’t happen to pick up any brewskies, did you, son?”
Claire closed her eyes for a second and took a deep breath. Her father had never used the word brewskies in his whole life. He’d never called Max “son” either. She was embarrassed for him, but figured it wasn’t fair to judge. After all, when you had a twenty-one-year-old near supermodel standing in all of her naked glory in the kitchen of your summerhouse, you were bound to be a little rattled.
She would change eventually, Claire figured, but it never happened. Cleo ate dinner in her bikini, she cleared the table in her bikini, and then she sat and had a glass of wine with the whole family in her bikini.
When Maureen arrived later that night, she walked in, looked right at Cleo, and let out an “Oh!” Then she tried to recover and said, “I guess you’re ready for the beach.” Cleo just smiled.
And that was just the first night. It seemed that Cleo intended to wear nothing but her bikini for the entire vacation. In the mornings, she was in the kitchen, sipping coffee, bikini-clad.
“I mean, she’s great, but don’t you think it’s a little weird that she never puts anything else on?” Claire asked Martha. Martha just shrugged, which bugged Claire. Normally, this was the kind of thing that Martha would jump right in on, getting upset and whispering behind Cleo’s back. But she barely seemed to notice.
“I can’t believe we have to share a room,” Claire went on. This surely would make Martha angry. “Just because Mom doesn’t want Max and Cleo in the same room, we have to share. They each get their own space.” Martha just shrugged again, and Claire grabbed a towel and left the room.
ON SUNDAY NIGHT, THE WHOLE FAMILY sat outside making s’mores after dinner and Claire drank glass after glass of white wine. Weezy kept talking about what activities everyone wanted to do, like they were at some sort of summer camp; Will read the paper and called Max “son”; Maureen kept getting up to sneak around the house and have a cigarette, like they all couldn’t smell the smoke on her when she got back; Martha was lost in her own thoughts and stared at the stars; and Max and Cleo used any excuse to touch each other, which would have been inappropriate for a family vacation anyway, but since Cleo was half-naked, it was downright pornographic.
“Aren’t you cold?” Claire asked.
Cleo laughed. “No, I never get cold at the beach. It’s like the sun warms me all day and stays with me into the night. I could live at the beach.”
Claire snorted into her glass. Then she let herself admit that if she looked like Cleo did in a bikini, she would consider wearing one as much as possible too.
The night ended with everyone playing Scrabble, which Claire thought would make her feel better since she would surely win. She ignored it when Weezy said to Cleo, “Watch out for Martha! She’s a killer at this game.” Claire wanted to point out that Martha almost never won Scrabble. It was Claire’s game.
It turned out that in addition to having a body that was meant to live in a bikini, Cleo also had an incredible vocabulary. After she got a triple word score by turning dish into dishabille, Claire made a comment about memorizing the dictionary and Cleo actually blushed.
“My first nanny was French, and she always had trouble with English. She was always asking me, ‘What’s the word for this?’ and I wanted to make sure that I could tell her, so I kept a dictionary with me. Then it just became a habit. I read dictionaries all the time. And thesauruses. I just love words, I guess,” Cleo said. She shrugged and smiled a little bit and Claire